Poetic License
By Tamara Mizell
LSU Office of Communications & University Relations
If you have ever read Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" or "The Raven," you may understand Professor J. Gerald Kennedy's fascination with the 19th century author. More than a century after Poe's death, many of his tension-filled tales continue to keep readers on the edge of their seats.
Kennedy's appreciation of Poe's writings began when he was a teenager and has been very influential on his academic career. When he earned his doctorate from Duke in 1973, Poe was the topic of his dissertation. Thirty-six years and 11 books later, he is a renowned expert on Poe, as well as Ernest Hemingway.
Recently, Kennedy participated in the University of Virginia's Edgar Allan Poe bicentennial celebration by giving multiple lectures on the author. He also collaborated with University of Virginia Professor Jerome McGann to organize and conduct a two-day symposium called "Rethinking the Center, Remapping the Culture: Poe and the American Renaissance." According to Kennedy, the purpose for the symposium was to reexamine Poe's relationship to American Literature.
"Our aim was to reposition him not at the margins, where he is sometimes caricatured as an exotic outsider, but rather as someone centrally positioned to understand and critique an emerging national culture by virtue of his editorial work in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York," said Kennedy.
Currently, Kennedy is working on his forthcoming book, Illusions of National Destiny, which "explores the cultural conflicts in American society-such as slavery and sectional mistrust, Indian removal, women's rights, immigration, economics, and territorial expansion-that undermined the literary myth-making intended to articulate a distinctive and unified national identity."
Kennedy is also editing a volume on the early American novel for a prestigious forthcoming series, The Oxford History of the Novel in English.